No matter what kind of game you find yourself in, no matter how good or bad the luck, you can change your life completely with a single thought or a single act of love.— Gregory David Roberts, author of Shantaram, a novel.

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(Part One) A Controlled Dangerous Substance Act

There was Dean Levy and he was counting the Quaaludes and he kept losing the count at around fifty or sixty. It was beginning to make him mad and his wife Brenda came over to help and dropped the coffee on his lap and he jumped up.

“Come on. Watch out with that, huh,” Dean’s voice whined at her.

Chrissie Bishop and Billie Sky were laughing at them and bumbling around the room. Every time Billie said something to Christine, she would say, “What, what, what,” over and over because she was so high she couldn’t hear.

The dog Conan woke up and started snuffling around the door and looked up at Dean and then squatted. It was diarrhea and it was mixed with blood.

She stumbled to the cabinet and pulled it open. The medicine was there and she took it down from the shelf. She opened it and dropped two caps into her hand. Dean gave her the finger, smiling at Billie and Billie laughed hard into the kitchen air. Chrissie had the paper towels in her hand and was wiping up the pool of brown mixed red from the floor and Brenda watched with wide eyes as Chrissie’s feet just slicked right out from under her and she managed to hold the towels above her head when she fell.

The mess in the towels was running down her arm and she was swearing. Everyone broke out laughing and Conan ran into the living room and hid behind the couch.

Dean lost the count again.

Brenda went over to the dog and opened the mouth of it. She dropped the caps in and rubbed his throat.

Billie helped Dean make the count right and filled two envelopes with one hundred pills each. There were seven hundred or more still in the jar that they had picked up from Sammy at the Frost Pharmacy in East Orange earlier that day. Which means, between selling close to seventy-five in the afternoon to Jon, who was a lawyer practicing in the District Attorney’s office in town, they had, between the four of them, eaten at least twenty-five of the Quaaludes.

They had to make a delivery. None of them were really in any shape to go out but Mickey, who was a regular customer, had called and he was in begging mode.

“Dean, Dean, I just can’t wait until tomorrow. Please. I’ll kick in an extra ten if you can deliver tonight.”

Dean, cash registers clicking in an otherwise dysfunctional mind, heard himself saying, “That would be per hundred, am I correct?” and the deal was sealed.

As fate would have it, more than just that deal was going down. Listening at the end of Mickey’s hook-up, grinning madly at each other, were the Orange, New Jersey’s finest undercover mad dog detectives who, at the most inopportune time, had come in on Mickey and his “pinch” (girl friend), known as Viola, whilst they were in the midst of selling some pills to one of the dicks.

Selling drugs to cops was bad for business. Unless, of course, they were your friends. Unfortunately for Mickey and his old lady these cops were not their friends but they certainly offered what appeared to be a deal that seemed quite reasonable at the time.

“So all you got to do is call the man for us and arrange for him to bring you two-hundred pills and we’ll let you guys slither on the sales charges and only press for the possession,” the pasty-faced Irish cop hissed at Mickey. “You know what a big difference that will make to the judge and you’ll have us testifying not to send you away. Your girl-friend is real pretty and she would have a rough time down at the Newark Street Jail.”

Viola was crying by now and she said, “Mickey, Mickey, don’t you see that we have no choice?”

Pasty-faced Irish smiled and patted her gently on the shoulder as he breathed beer-breath in Mickey’s face and said, “You got a smart girl-friend. I hope you are as smart as her.”

“Haw haw haw,” laughed D’azeo. “I don’t know. It seems like they’ve been thinking about this so long. I really don’t think they want to help us. Let’s just take them down. It’s Friday night so they’ll be stuck in jail for the weekend.”

He turned to Mickey, grinning like some dogs do when spoken to with a bone in the air waving above their heads, “You’ll have a bigger arsehole after a weekend in there. Never have to worry about constipation again, har har har.”

Viola sobbed uncontrollably and Mickey had wide-spinning-like-a-rabbit-in-the-headlight eyes. He caved and took the phone that Irish held out to him. Mickey called Dean.

Dean was at the wheel and Brenda sat next to him all Quaalude loving him with her hands on him in places that were too numb to know the difference and he grinned and watched the lane lines move in the road. The wad of pills pressed Brenda in her wet spot between her legs and she wiggled around lighting a cigarette between the lips on her face that tingled with half-feeling.

Billie and Chrissie in the back seat of the big Chrysler moved into each other and her tongue moving in the back of Billie’s throat as he moaned and slid his hand into her unsnapped jeans and she made the sexing motion with his hand slipping into her sweet.

The lights of the road spilled ahead of them as Chrissi spilled into Billie’s hand and she reached for his and Brenda was so moved by the noise in the back seat that as they turned the corner onto the street where Mickey and Viola lived she reached into Dean’s shirt and began to play with his nipple and——–

The lights were all around them. Shouting. Beer breath. Irish eyes not smiling and guns in their faces and blue lights on spin and Dean swallowed his gum when Brenda almost pulled off the nipple on his chest as she whipped her hand away and Chrissie pulled back from Billie so fast that her breath was still hot as she pulsed empty and closed and Billie was coughing for breath because he knew that he was in big trouble. (To Be Continued)